Springthorpe, Nigel. "The Polonaise and Mazurka in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden: Style and Structure in the Music of Johann Christian Roellig."

Springthorpe, Nigel. "The Polonaise and Mazurka in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden: Style and Structure in the Music of Johann Christian Roellig." Eighteenth Century Music 13, no. 2 (September 2016):183-209.


Abstract:
While recent studies have explored the significance of the Polish style in the music of Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, and the importance of Polish dances in Dresden has long been recognized, the eighteenth-century German polonaise remains a largely neglected area of inquiry. The restoration of the library of the Singakademie zu Berlin in 2000 has made it possible to explore an important collection of mostly unica sources of music by Saxon composers from c1740 to 1763 amassed by the Meissen porcelain mosaic artist Carl Jacob Christian Klipfel (1727–1802). Klipfel's collection includes music by Johann Christian Roellig (born 1716), possibly the most prolific composer of polonaises in Dresden during this period and one of the earliest German composers to write mazurs (mazurkas) in instrumental works. The first-hand knowledge of the Polish style that musicians employed by the Saxon electoral court and Count von Brühl gained as a result of frequent journeys to Warsaw resulted in Dresden polonaises that are relatively un-‘Germanized’. This article examines the social and musical contexts of the polonaise in mid-eighteenth-century Dresden, including the repertoire of the annual Redouten (masked balls), then examines the polonaises and mazurkas of Roellig and his contemporaries, including Johann Georg Knechtel, Georg Gebel and Gottlob Harrer. A survey of the use of the polonaise in Redoutentänze, symphonies and partitas reveals significant differences in style and structure between these genres.